Saturday, June 24, 2006

dBase II was a handly tool.

dBase II was a lot of fun and allowed me to use files like I never did with BASIC. There were all kinds of cool stuff which I had to manually program in Basic like, sorting and indexing but which I could do with just one keyword: sort or if I wanted to index a file: index on. Although I could do lots of things with dBase II, it was still the backwoods when it came to creating reports. All I could do was to use ASCII characters as separators which was very tedious to do. dBaseIII changed all that when it came out with cool formatting stuff. One could draw boxes and I got crazy with it for a while. When programming, I used a very handy but difficult editor which came with MS-DOS, edlin. The one good thing about it was that it came bundled with MS-DOS and was quite easy to use. I was quite happy with it until a friend of mine introced me to the Norton Editor which was way more cool than edlin. With the Norton Editor I could have two editing windows where I could copy and paste code. The Norton Editor was also small so I could just keep it in one diskette with the other tools that I used to write programs.

They say "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king". I suppose that is true in more ways than one. Since I knew a little more about programming, I could make a little money by giving lessons which I did for a while and I used BASIC to introduce beginners to the joys of computer programming. On one class where I trained personnel from a local bank, after several lectures on the basics of computer programming like variables and operations, I asked them to write a small program to indicate if they had grasped the concepts of BASIC computer programming as it related to their work. Most of them were using Visicalc to do their worksheets and it was a great boost from manual computation using paper columnar worksheets.

No one had the inclination to do anything that involved thinking outside their usual day to day work so I was kind of placed in an embarassing situation of not having taught them anything after several sessions. At this time, computers were not really welcome in the work place because of the notion that they would render people obsolete so, there is a strong need to show that personal computers were great tools for personal productivity. This is easier said than done and many people in the workplace had a secret fear of these new intelligent interlopers. I therefore had to come up with something that would demonstrate the helpfulness of personal computers and also to bolster my status as someone who knew what he was talking about.

Asking one participant to point out the one thing that he could do with his Visicalc but which was somehow also tedious and he said he found it tedious and time-consuming to make amortization tables for loan applicants. Here was an opportunity for me to make converts of skeptics and I asked for the details regarding this task. He gave me the different interacting components like
  • Principal amount
  • Term of the loan
  • Interest rate
  • Dates: starting and maturity
  • Type of payment (monthly/semi-monthly/quarterly etc)
Dashing off a small program using dBase II with the participants looking on while I explained the process as I created the small tool for making amortization tables, we concluded the session with murmurs of approval for this wonderful thing called computer programming. This little exercise helped to bring their perception of me as a Tech Guru a couple of notches higher which was not too bad.

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posted by underdog @ 8:04 AM 0 comments

Friday, June 09, 2006

dBase II was all the rage

One thing became abundantly clear to me: files were important if one were to have anything become persistent. Basic commands Put and Get allows you to store and retrieve the information that you want to retain. I used it a little bit with my program that stored the results of the Jai Alai games which I tried to present in this way and that with the hope that it would eventually show me some kind of pattern that I can follow. While it was all very fine I still needed a way of easily storing more complicated data where I could do cross-referencing and indexing.

A friend had told me about a hot new product called dBase II so I lost no time in looking for materials about it. I also found out that there was a short course being offered in the University so I enrolled in it. Unluckily for me, no one else enrolled in the course so I was informed that the course would be cancelled due to lack of interested students. This was a big blow to my plans to become proficient in this terrific language so I proposed to the teacher to let me take the course on my own. All he had to give me was a book and a computer. I told him he did not have to give any lectures. I will just learn on my own.

So there I was with a sparkling brand new Dimension Personal Computer with the Z-80 microprocessor powering it and using the advanced CP/M operating system. It had built-in 5 1/4 floppy disk drives so I could save my work. Having access to the tutorial manual only while I was in school was a big inconvenience for me. I thought it would be far better if I had my own manual so I arranged to buy my own book so I could study while at home. This really boosted my learning by leaps and bounds and I have used this system since. I reasoned that books were better than teachers because one could go fast or slow depending on one's pace and still be able to go back and forward with ease. A teacher might spend too much time on something and gloss over another.

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posted by underdog @ 11:25 AM 0 comments

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